João put the wood in a basket, checked the position of the log and the four men braced themselves against the boat until it was balanced on the cylinder of wood, keeping it in that position while Paulino placed a second roller under the prow then hurried back to help the others push. As soon as one roller emerged at the back, he took it around to the prow, continuing to do so all the way to the edge of the water. Once the jangada was afloat, Isaac took all the heavy logs far enough back on the sand to be out of the way of the incoming tide, while they held the boat on the waves, immersed up to the waist. As soon as he returned they all heaved themselves up into the boat together. Grasping the rudder, João immediately hauled on the mainsheet and the jangada started to glide across the sea with the ease and grace of a sailing dinghy.
Behind them the dunes were turning pink as other jangadas, sails unfurled, seemed to be hurrying after them, bumping across the shore like crumpled butterflies.
IN A CROSSWIND the jangada headed straight for the open sea, with the characteristic lapping of the water against the hull and the gentle swaying that forces the body to adjust its balance all the time. Standing at the stern, his buttocks propped on a sort of narrow bench, João was concentrating on steering, both hands glued firmly to the steering oar. Roetgen was sitting with Isaac and Paulino on the windward side; he’d started nibbling his block of rapadura, less from hunger than to fit in with the others. Happy to be at sea, he examined the boat with the keen appreciation of a sailing enthusiast.
About seven yards long and two yards wide, the jangada was of a marvelous technical elegance. Shaped like a decked barge with no handrail or cockpit, the hull narrowed elegantly at either end, making it more like a sailboard than any flat-bottomed vessel. Apart from the thwart, at the stern, and a sort of trestle just in front that was used to wind the sheets around or to lean against when standing up, the only other component was a beam of solid wood supported by rods into which was fitted a detachable, unstayed lateen yard, slender and supple, like the rib of a leaf.
On the dark brown sail, spotted with holes and patches, was an advert in large black letters: Industria de Extração de Aracati.
The most astonishing aspect for Roetgen, however, was the exemplary absence of all metal on the sailing boat. Not a shackle, not a nail in the construction … everything was tied or pegged; even the lateen yard and the boom, each made of several pieces were simply whipped together with fishing line!
The ultimate praise of vegetable matter, an out-of-date hymn to that age of gold that came before the sword, the arquebus, the helmet and armor. There was a time when the Indians of this coast begged forgiveness of the trees before felling them with no other cutting edge than fire and flint.
As João explained afterward, however fragile the whole might be, it did mean they could repair any damage very quickly with the means on board. This was especially the case since any ruptures always came at the weak points created by the joints and as the rope always gave way before the wood, all they had to do was to lash the pieces that had come apart together again and the boat was as good as new. The same was true of the hull, its simple construction meaning it could be repaired without the need of a carpenter. Nothing escaped this disregard of things metal, not even the anchor, the tauaçu, the stone nucleus in a framework of wood hardened by fire: four branches tied together at one end with two others forming a cross to secure the cage and grip the sand or seaweed. Always the same principle—was it economy or did it derive from something unconscious and more decisive?—governing the least of their technical productions: three branches would not have been enough to hold the stone, a fifth would have been superfluous … A theorem to explain why the principal proportions of timber had not changed an inch for thousands of years: a Roman villa or a Provençal farmhouse, a Cathar castle or a Venetian palazzo, for comparable buildings the same size of beams and rafters would be found, too thin and the wood gives way, too thick, it’s wasted. Thus the rules of these builders were founded, before all the mathematics of the resistance of materials, on a happy medium that a certain number of lost moorings or collapsed roofs had helped to establish.
A SUDDEN BURST of activity interrupted Roetgen’s reflections. At an order from João, who immediately unhitched the clew of the mainsail, the two fishermen handed the sail, then quickly spilled the wind by bundling the sail around the mast with the topping lift. Once that was done, João came to help them unstep the lateen yard and lay it down with the boom along the center of the boat. Its wings clipped, the jangada came to a halt on the green water, nothing more than a frail raft encumbered with spars, a piece of flotsam hardly fitted to brave the rigors of the Atlantic. They cast anchor. The sun was rising; all the land around had disappeared.
Paulino and Isaac were sitting on the same side, feet dangling over the edge of the platform; instinctively Roetgen went to the other side, two yards from João. He was wondering what kind of bait they were going to use when he saw him unwind his line without bothering about his hooks at all. The line having quickly reached the bottom—there could only have been about twenty yards of depth—João took it in his fingers and pulled it up and down, as if fishing with a jigger.
“You’ve nothing to use as bait?” Roetgen asked, amazed.
João was surprised anyone could even ask the question. That’s the way it was, no one did it any other way. Attracted by the jerks and the glitter of the hooks, some creature always took it eventually; once they’d hauled it up, it was used as bait for larger catches.
Hours passed, silent, somnolent hours during which the four men pursued the same quest beneath the sun. It was like the summary of an avant-garde play, Roetgen thought, reflecting on the absurdity of their situation: all alone on the Atlantic, four shipwrecked sailors dip their unbaited hooks in the water.
A slack sea, the sun burning their necks, the creak of wood, marionnette-like contortions, out of sync, abrupt at times, like sleeping bodies twitching …
Toward noon they regretted having eaten their supply of sugar so quickly. Imitating the others, Roetgen put pinches of manioc flour in his mouth, just enough to stave off the pangs of hunger and to increase his desire for another drink from the jerrican. As time passed, the expressions on their faces became more feverish, their gestures more febrile, furtive, as if the better to conjure up hope from the depths. They changed arms more often, their muscles growing numb from repeating the same action.
Racked by hunger, four shipwrecked sailors beg the god of the oceans to take pity on them, but in vain … Twitching with nervous tics, four schizophrenics try to trap flies with vinegar … Petrified, four seamen insult God, the sea and fish before deciding to eat the cabin boy …
“Put that over your head,” João said, handing him a piece of damp sacking, “you’ll get sunstroke.” Only then did he notice the straw hats the three of them were wearing.
Toward three in the afternoon, João let out an oath and pulled in his line as quickly as possible. He’d finally managed to spear a silvery fish hardly bigger than a sprat by the tail. Eight hours, eight hours for this small fry! Immediately there was an amazing bustle of activity on the deck: while João cut his catch up into thin slivers, careful to skim the backbone, Paulino and Isaac lit a fire in an oil can that they placed on the lee side. As soon as the wood was burning, they placed an old billycan filled with seawater on this improvized brazier. You would have sworn the men were going to cook their anchovy to eat it right away. Roetgen would have swallowed it raw, so tormenting were the pangs of hunger he felt. But João shared out the strips of fish he had prepared, so that they could all now bait their lines.
Scarcely five minutes later, a strong bite tugged at his arm. Striking the fish, he started to pull in his line cautiously, terrified he might make a wrong move. João came rushing over, bellowing advice, ready to take the line out of his hands. Mortified by this lack of confidence in him, Roetgen almost yielded to the fisherman’s mute command, but his instinct took over and he started to talk to the f
ish in French, mixing insults and cajolery, going along with its attempts to escape, all the better to halt them smoothly after a while, oblivious to everything beyond the living tension at his fingertips.
“Cavala,” said João when he saw the flash zigzagging up toward the surface. “And a fine one!”
One last jerk and a sort of long bonito landed on the deck with a dull slap. Paralyzed for a moment at this change of environment, it opened its mouth before struggling blindly. If paradise or hell existed, that would be the way the dead would wriggle when they arrived in those murky nightmare regions … João disembowelled it live, chucked its entrails overboard and chopped it up into large quivering slices. Keeping back a few for renewing the bait, he put the rest in the pot to boil.
They all watched it cooking. Once it was done, Paulino took out the slices with a piece of wood and placed them in front of him. The three fishermen fell on the food, burning their fingers to roll pieces in their bag of farofa, spitting out the bones into the sea with obvious pleasure, constantly congratulating the francês on such an excellent first catch. Roetgen did the same, appreciating each mouthful, convinced he had never tasted anything so delicious.
When they were full, they could finally start fishing. It was four in the afternoon.
Sea bream, albacores, rays, dogfish, dorados … they gathered in the fish in a sustained rhythm. Sometimes it took five or ten minutes, but the line never came up empty. Roetgen discovered a very different world from the one he was familiar with: here there was no pleasure taken in the act of fishing, hauling in a scad was like extracting ore, with no waste of emotions or of time. True, there were occasional exclamations at an exceptional catch, but they were those of miners discovering an unexpected seam of coal, richer, easier to take out. The animal was knocked on the head and thrown into the basket; when it was full to overflowing, one of the fishermen would wedge his line to the deck and set about salting them: scale and clean them out, cut off the heads, remove the fillets and pile them up in a crate in the prow of the jangada, cover them with a layer of coarse salt … Roetgen made an effort to assimilate this expertise; soon he was able to take his turn with the others. This essential task took a good half hour, at the end your back was aching, your hands scratched and smarting from the salt, but you felt pleased with yourself and a job well done.
Concentrating on his every movement, anxious not to lose the respect of the fishermen, Roetgen made it a point of honor to keep to their rhythm. This gave him no respite, he wasn’t even thinking anymore but fell into the catatonic state he’d been in on the bus ride to Canoa. Moéma, Thaïs, Brazil, everything had gone; his mind clear, he wallowed in work and amnesia.
At sunset the fish became more difficult to take. The sea wind had started to blow, gradually raising a heavy, dangerous-looking swell around the jangada. A bank of leaden cloud, very low on the horizon, seemed to be approaching very quickly. It was an ominous sign, but the fishermen didn’t seem particularly worried about it. Making the most of the last of the light, Paulino and João made fast every last object on the deck, while Isaac was cooking a second bonito they’d kept for themselves. It was put to cool while each rolled up his line and replaced it with a stronger one with larger hooks.
“At night it’s only the big ones that bite,” João explained, “sharks, swordfish, that kind of thing, so just two of us fish, to avoid getting in each other’s way.”
Paulino and Isaac had a bite to eat with them, then went to lie down in the hold. Seeing a hand wedge a bit of cloth between the hatch cover and the coaming—presumably to let in some air—Roetgen wondered how the two men had been able to squeeze into such a restricted space: as far as he could tell, there was only about twenty inches headroom! At a sign from João, he sat down with his back against the sampson post and, following his example, tied himself to it around his waist and checked his bowline before starting fishing again.
The sea had gotten up to such an extent that occasionally long breakers swept over the boat. Roetgen could see the phosphorescent crests running along high above him in the black of the night, mountains of foaming water that the jangada finally topped just at the moment when it seemed certain they were about to engulf it. Constantly undulating and dragging its anchor—as an experienced seaman, João had made sure he doubled the length of the anchor cable—slipping sideways or brought up suddenly into the wind by the abrupt tautening of the cable, the prow half disappearing into the water, the boat somehow managed to ride out the squall. When the deck was submerged beneath a bigger wave, the two men were left sitting in foaming water like a bubble bath—without the rope cutting into their waists, they would certainly have been swept away—then the exhausting rodeo started up again until another breaker came crashing over them. Soaked from head to toe, eyes stinging, blinded by the spindrift, Roetgen lived through the worst watch of his life. Hardly reassured by Seu João’s morose impassibility, he forced himself to fish without managing to free himself from a degrading animal fear. Frozen stiff and deafened by the wind and the roar of the Atlantic, he saw monsters.
WHEN PAULINO AND Isaac came to relieve them around one in the morning there were hardly any fish in the basket: three swordfish for Roetgen and two for João, plus a hammerhead shark of about thirty pounds. There was still a heavy sea but the wind was slackening.
“The tide’s turning,” João said to Paulino, “They should start biting a bit more. Don’t forget to take in the anchor cable bit by bit.”
He crawled over to the hatch and held the cover half open and Roetgen slipped inside. “Go on, there’s plenty of room,” he said, seeing Roetgen hesitate. Once he had disappeared, João followed him into the hold and pulled down the hatch behind him, taking care not to close it completely. During the few seconds in which he was shrouded in darkness, in that sea-tossed coffin, he had to keep a grip on himself not to go back up on deck.
João struck a match and lit a little piece of candle wedged in between two sacks of salt, then wriggled to get in a more comfortable position. “Puxa!” he muttered, “What filthy weather!”
Stretched out on their sides, on either side of the centerboard case, they were closer to each other than they would ever be up in the open air. João’s face looked as if it were carved from old wood, each of his wrinkles being a separate curve of the grain. The hold had a strong smell of fish and brine.
“Is it often like this?” Roetgen asked.
“From time to time, when the moon’s in the wrong quarter. The problem is that the sharks don’t like …”
“They sell well?”
“Like the others, but there’s more meat on them. And then there’s a bonus for the liver and the fins.”
“What do they do with them?”
“The liver goes to the laboratories. I don’t really know but it seems it’s good for medicines, creams … It’s the Chinese who buy the fins. They’re very partial to them from what people say. Are there some in your part of the world too?”
“Sharks or Chinese?”
“Sharks.”
“Not as many as around here. And they’re farther down, well away from the shore.”
“And sea bream?”
“There’s hardly any left. They’ve been overfished. It’s the same with all the others, certain species have even disappeared entirely.”
“How is that possible?” João cried, suddenly frightened by that prospect.
“I tell you: too much industrial-scale fishing, pollution … it’s a real disaster.”
João clicked his tongue several times to express his disapproval. “God, it’s not possible, things like that! Is it far away where you come from?”
“France, you mean?”
“How should I know? Where you come from, I mean.”
“Three thousand miles, more or less.”
João frowned. “How many hours by bus would that be?” His serious expression made it clear that he had no idea where France was and couldn’t imagine a distance until it was converted in
to the only yardsticks he was familiar with: days on foot for shorter distances, hours on the bus for longer ones. Caught unprepared, Roetgen gave him a journey time in hours by plane, but the lack of response told him it meant nothing to the fisherman. He therefore made a mental calculation of the distance the jangada could cover in a day and told João: two months sailing to the east, provided there was a constant favorable wind during the whole of the voyage.
“Two months!” João repeated, visibly impressed this time. He was silent for several minutes, thinking it over, before coming back to the subject: “Where you live are there jaguars in the mata as well?”
“No.”
“And armadillos?”
“No.”
“Boas, anteaters, parrots?”
“No, João. We have different animals, but it’s a bit the same as with the fish, there aren’t that many left.”
“Oh, right,” João said, disappointed at a land so lacking in the essentials. “Not even caymans? And mango trees, at least you must have some mango trees?”
We’ve got high-speed trains, the Airbus and rockets, João, computers that can do calculations more quickly than our brains and contain complete encyclopedias. We have an impressive literary and artistic past, the greatest perfume makers, dress designers of genius who make such magnificent negligées if you lived three times over you still wouldn’t have enough to pay for them. We have nuclear power stations that produce waste that will remain deadly for ten thousand years, perhaps more, we don’t really know. Just imagine, João, ten thousand years! As if the first Homo sapiens had bequeathed us rubbish bins that were so contaminated they’d still poison everything around them to this day. We also have tremendous bombs, little marvels capable of wiping out your mango trees, your jaguars and your parrots forever. Capable of putting an end to your race, João, to the whole of the human race! But, thank God, we have a very high opinion of ourselves.
Where Tigers Are at Home Page 32